“We have to find that leaker, because that’s a sick person,” Trump told reporters. “The person that did the story will go to jail if he doesn’t say. And I think everybody would understand they put this mission at great risk.” Trump described in detail the search-and-rescue mission that occurred over the weekend, saying it involved 21 planes to rescue one pilot and some 155 aircraft to get the other. He said US military personnel conducted a complicated deception operation to rescue the second airman, who was stranded deep in Iranian territory. At one point, Trump asked Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Dan Caine if he could say how many US military personnel were involved in the mission. The general said he’d “love to keep that a secret,” but the president followed by saying “I’ll keep it a secret, but it was hundreds.”

And chaser:

Trump Threatens to Jail Journalists Who Wrote on Rescue Mission President Donald Trump threatened to jail journalists who published details of a daring US military raid to rescue two airmen whose aircraft was shot down over Iran, accusing them of jeopardizing the ...

Shot:
www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Iraq’s Kurds Are Caught in the Crossfire of a War They Didn’t Start Iraqi Kurdistan, once an oasis of hard-won stability, must navigate complex security challenges stemming from the war in the Middle East.

For the 1st time, Iran hits Iraqi Kurdistan's Peshmerga with ballistic missiles — 6 dead, 30 wounded. The KRG has no air defenses, no seat at negotiating table, and no way to stop a war they didn't start from rolling over everything they've built. www.worldpoliticsreview.com/iraq-kurds-c...

What Iranian New Year, end of Ramadan feel like as war rages By coincidence, the Iranian New Year of Nowruz and the celebration marking the end of Ramadan, Eid-al-Fitr, arrived on the same day. Learn about how Kurds celebrate these dual milestones not far from

Two holidays, one city. How wartime Eid-al-Fitr and Nowruz are seen in Erbil, Iraqi Kurdistan.
www.iranwar.news/p/what-irani...

America’s friends in Iraq pay the price The fighting next door to the Kurdish region of Iraq is freezing Erbil’s economy, as grounded flights, power shortages, and a dollar crunch leave business with little fiscal room to maneuver.

Drones overhead. Airport closed. Gas fields dark. Dollar scarce.

I spent an evening with Kurdish businessmen in Erbil doing the math on how long they can last.

America's most reliable allies in the region are paying for a war they didn't start.

New: open.substack.com/pub/irandisp...

In the 1991 Gulf War, the US and the world condemned Saddam for burning Kuwaiti oil wells, calling it environmental warfare. The danger was profound.

In 2003, US intelligence was deeply concerned about him doing it again. Now, it’s US policy.

DoD to Anthropic: drop AI safeguards or lose your $200M contract.

Anthropic: no.

First Silicon Valley vs. Trump AI showdown, and it landed on a Friday deadline.

open.substack.com/pub/trulyback/p/when-the...

Should the companies building the most powerful technology in human history get to choose the people who regulate them? h̲t̲t̲p̲s̲://t̲r̲u̲l̲y̲b̲a̲c̲k̲.s̲u̲b̲s̲t̲a̲c̲k̲.c̲o̲m̲/p̲/w̲h̲y̲-a̲i̲-g̲i̲a̲n̲t̲s̲-a̲r̲e̲-b̲u̲y̲i̲n̲g̲-t̲h̲e̲-m̲i̲d̲t̲e̲r̲m̲s̲

Alex Bores quit Palantir over its ICE contracts. Now Palantir's co-founder is spending some of those ICE profits to fund attack ads against Bores's congressional campaign because Bores wrote NY's AI safety law. trulyback.substack.com/p/why-ai-giants-are-buyi...

Of the Best Picture nominees this year, I've seen F1 and Frankenstein, and they were ... fine? I am working my way through the rest as quickly as I can, but neither F-entries struck me as Best Picture material. Not horrible, not great.

Why AI Giants Are Buying the Midterms The AI industry is spending more than $400 million to pick its own regulators.

The AI industry is spending more than $400 million to pick its own regulators in the 2026 midterms.

Anthropic just dropped $20M on one side. OpenAI's backers have $100M on the other.

More at Truly Back. Free to subscribe.

State Department Tweets Update: People are Acting. You Can Too The National Security Archive and Archive Team are on it — but FOIA requests from regular citizens may be the strongest tool we have.

Full step-by-step with a sample request you can copy:

The good news: You can help! Just file a FOIA request. It takes 10 minutes and creates a legal obligation to preserve records.

Update: After my post about the State Department deleting 17 years of tweets, both the Archive Team and the GW National Security Archive are looking into preservation. They were grateful for the heads-up but face real technical challenges at this scale.

The Trump State Department Is Deleting 17 Years of Tweets. We Have Days, Maybe Hours. If you have archival tools, API access, or scraping capabilities, act now.

We have to act fucking now.

If these are already archived somewhere, great. But we have to protect what we can. That is OUR data, and OUR information and OUR history. We can't let Trump become the beginning and end of American diplomatic history.

I don't have the resources to archive the tweets, but I will get as many as I can.

Imperative that there be a concerted effort on the part of maybe GWU National Security Archives, etc. to grab the tweets and archive them somehow.

State Department will delete X posts from before Trump returned to office The policy change orders the removal of any post made by official State Department accounts on X before President Trump returned to office in 2025.

So, this administration is about to memory hole all of the @usstatedept.bsky.social tweets prior to Jan 20, 2025. Is any archival organization doing anything about this? Ambassador and embassies are also affected! www.vpm.org/npr-news/npr...

Was the lack of masks not proof enough?

Loved contributing to this series. Thank you for the opportunity!

The fragmentation flywheel Why the Fourth Industrial Revolution resists political response

The system needing reform is the same system that prevents reformers from organizing.

Super pumped to publish a new essay for @niskanencenter.bsky.social on why the fourth industrial revolution resists political response… and why we should build capacity anyway.

Andor | Luthen Rael’s Monologue | Disney+ YouTube video by Star Wars

When the monopolist owns the megaphone, the playbook breaks.

Today, the tools we'd use to organize resistance are controlled by the forces we need to resist. We're forced onto digital terrain owned by the people we're trying to rein in.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3RC...

The Gilded Age robber barons were ruthless. They bought legislators and hired strikebreakers. But they couldn't control what farmers thought about them. Tarbell exposed Standard Oil. Sinclair's Jungle changed federal law. The media was too diffuse to control.

That's no longer true.

As a journalist, I can tell you that is designed for you to ignore it in disgust, so they can then “report” that Prof. Mann “declined to comment”.

if you are talking today about how bad maduro was and were alive, at all, during the run-up to the iraq war you are potentially the dumbest person to ever live

People are going to try and lure you into debates about whether Maduro was a good guy or not and the thing is, it doesn’t matter for the purposes of discussing whether violent kidnappings and extrajudicial murders by the US government are ok. No, they aren’t! End of convo.

Instacart caught using shady algorithm to charge different prices to individual customers — in the same stores, bombshell study reveals Groundwork, a consumer advocacy group, said Instacart’s pricing algorithm could lead to shoppers forking over an extra $1,200 on groceries each year.

This is enraging, and you should be VERY VERY pissed off about it. But I'm happy that my lovely partner is part of the organization that did the study that revealed this shadiness!

Political leaders in Moldova, Romania, and Central and East. Europe should read the new U.S. National Security Strategy very carefully and adjust policy accordingly. It's more critical of the European Union than of Russia. It openly and gleefully spreads far-right propaganda, ...

Manhattan Luxury Apartment Market Surges in Month After Mamdani’s Win Real estate brokers say there has been no slowdown in demand from wealthy buyers.

Told you so…

'“Yes, there is a new mayor, and there are a lot of worries, but our clients are saying, ‘We love New York,’” Naftali said. “There is no slowdown in demand.”'